Yet as one glorious day followed another Clem felt there must be escape. This was a net into which he had fallen, a snare he had not suspected. He must simply leave it. Whatever lay outside could not be worse than this. The desolate children seemed never to dream of escape, but they had no dreams of any kind, he discovered. Their hope went no further than to steal something to eat when Mom Berger was not looking, to stop working when Pop’s back was turned. They were ignorant, and he soon found, depraved as well. When he first discovered this depravity he was sick. His own parents had been people of pure heart, and from them he had inherited a love of cleanness. Mr. Fong had been clean in speech and act. Though Clem had seen a simple naturalness in the behavior of men in the countryside about Peking, it had been clean. Birth was clean, and the life of man and woman together was decent. There was nothing about it which he did not know as he knew life itself. But what he found here was indecency, the furtive fumbling of boys and girls who were animals. Pop grinned when he saw it, but Mom Berger yelled, “Cut that out, now!”
She was a thick-set woman, her neck as wide as her head, her waist as wide as her shoulders, her ankles as big as her calves. She wore a shapeless dress like a huge pillowcase without a belt. Except sometimes when she went to town with Pop, she was barefoot. Clem had never seen the feet of a woman before. Chinese women always wore shoes on their little bound feet and his mother had worn stockings and shoes. In China it was a disgrace for a woman to show her feet. And so it should be, Clem told himself, avoiding the sight of those fleshy pads upon which Ma Berger moved.
For the first few days he had lived in complete silence toward the children. There was no time for talk, had he been so inclined. Pop took him upstairs into a filthy room where there were a wide bed, a broken chair, some hooks upon the plastered wall. On the hooks hung a few ragged garments. Pop scratched his head as he stared about the room. “Reckon that bed won’t hold four of you,” he had rumbled. “You’ll have to have a shakedown, I guess. I’ll tell Mom.”
He went down the narrow circular stairs and left Clem alone. This was his return. He walked to one of the windows, deep set in the heavy stone wall, and gazed out of it to see the countryside beautiful. Long low hills rolled away toward the horizon and fields lay richly between. He had never seen such trees, but then he had seen very few trees. The northern Chinese landscape was bare of them, except for a few willows and a date tree or two at a village. This was a country fit for dreams, but he knew that whatever had been the dreams once held in this house, there could be no more. He tried to imagine his father, a boy perhaps in this very room, hearing the voice of God bid him go to a far country. Oh, if his father had not listened to God, he, Clem, might have been born here, too, and this would have been his home. Now it could never be that.
He heard heavy panting on the stairs, and Mom Berger’s loud voice cried at him.
“Come here, you, boy, and help me with these yere quilts!”
He went to the stair and saw her red face staring at him over an armful of filthy bedding.
“Am I to sleep on this?” he demanded.
“You jes’ bet you are,” she retorted. “Lay ’em to suit yourself.”
She threw the quilts down and turned and went downstairs again, and he picked them up and folded them neatly, trying to find the cleanest side for sleep. He would have to sleep in his clothes until he could get away, for of course he would go within the next day or two, as soon as he found the name of a town or of a decent farm.
But he did not go. The misery of the five children held him. He had no family left, and in a strange reasonless sort of way he felt these pull upon him. He would go, but only when he had given them help, had found their families, or had found some good man to whom he could complain of their plight. His wandering and his loneliness made him reliant upon himself. He was not afraid, but if he left them as they were, he would keep remembering them.
In silence on that first day he had made his pallet and put his locked suitcase at the head of it. Into the suitcase he folded his good clothes, and put on instead the ragged blue overalls. Then he went downstairs.
The big kitchen was also the living room. Mom Berger was cooking something in a heavy iron pot, stirring it with a long iron spoon.
“Pop says you’re to go out to that field yonder,” she told him, and nodded her head to the door. “They’re cuttin’ hay.”
He nodded and walked out to a field where he saw them all working in the distance. The sun was hot but not as hot as he had known it in Peking, and so it seemed only pleasant. The smell of the grass and the trees was in his nostrils, a rich green fragrance of the earth. What was hay? He had never seen it. When he got near he saw it was only grass such as the Chinese cut on hillsides for fuel.
He waited a moment until Pop Berger saw him. “Hey you, get to work there! Help Tim on that row!” Clem went to the sandy-haired boy. “You’ll have to show me. I’ve never cut hay.”
“Where’d you come from?” Tim retorted, without wanting to know. “You kin pitch.”
Clem did not answer. He watched while Tim’s rough claws grasped a huge fork and pitched hay upon a wagon pulled by two huge gray horses. It looked easy but it was hard. Nevertheless he had continued to pitch doggedly until the sun had set.
From that day on his life had proceeded. The work changed from one crop to another, but the hours were the same, from dawn to dark for them all. The girls worked in the house with the woman.
He became aware, however, of a certain day, dim in the minds of the children when he first came, which became more probable as the month dragged on. They expected a visit from what they called the Aid. What this Aid was Clem could not find out. He put questions to Tim, the eldest and most articulate of the boys. To the girls he did not speak at all. He felt a terror in them so deep, a timidity so rooted, that he thought they would run if he called their names, Mamie or Jen.
“Aid?” Tim had repeated stupidly. They were raking manure out of the barn. “Aid? It’s just — Aid. It’s a woman.”
“Why is she called Aid?” Tim considered this for a full minute.
“I dunno.”
“Does she help you?”
“Nope — never did. Talks to Pop and Mom.”
“What does she say?”
“Axes things.”
“What things?”
“Different — like does we work good, does the boys and girls sleep in one room — like that.” Tim grinned. “They’re scared of her.”
“Why don’t you tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“That you don’t get enough to eat — that they hit you.”
Tim’s wide pale mouth was always open. “We’re only Aid children.”
“What is that?” Clem began all over again.
“I tole you,” Tim said patiently. “We ain’t got no folks.”
“You mean you don’t know where your parents are?”
Tim shook his head.
“Are they dead?” Clem demanded.
“Bump never had none,” Tim offered.
Bump was the second boy, now bringing the wheelbarrow to fill with manure.
“Bump, haven’t you any kin?” Clem asked.
“What’s ’at?” Bump asked.
“Uncles and aunts and cousins.”
“I got nawthin’,” Bump said. He was spading up the manure that Clem had put into piles.
“Doesn’t anybody come and see you?”
“Nobody knows we’re here lessen the Aid tells,” Bump said.
“Then why do you all want this Aid woman to come?”